ritty

I love the website. Just last weekend I made a reader for my company's forum with absolutely no CSS. It's just plain text and a total of 38 lines of code written by me, which includes db connection parameters. Some people I showed it to wanted it to be the real forum. It was fast as hell and mobile and tty (lynx) friendly but didn't allow any sort of login, posting, or posts read tracking, so not really usable. Fun though. I love super basic things. Another really basic site I use is called Hacker News. Heard of it? :)

I'm probably going to take a lot of heat from all the young whippersnappers out there for this, but I absolutely love your comment about React. I'm going to save it. It totally describes my experiences with other developers. They want to use React to re-write major portions of our codebase that work perfectly well as is, just because React is super awesome! Can you guess how many of our customers have complained that our website isn't a single page application? I'll give you a hint, it's less than one. The devs will also make little teeny projects that would take less than an hour to write in Vanilla JS and make this big 20 hour development project that has a monolithic codebase that all the sudden needs routers and back button integration and url mangling and gigantic switch statements to draw the correct "page." Oh and don't forget you have to set up all that webpack and and compiling routines so that you can compile all that garbage into other garbage. And then you also have to do that build over and over again for every change. This is JavaScript. Script is in the name. It's not meant to be a compiled language. And contrary to our dev's beliefs, React does not run or draw faster than Vanilla JS, unless you are constantly redrawing the whole page in Vanilla JS, which no one does. I hate React.

I admit it, I hate single page apps. I see very few that actually work well. I don't hate JavaScript, it has its place, but you don't need to make an entire website an SPA. Stuff like the main Spotify, Slack, or Discord pages, and even things like Google Docs, and email front ends are fine for SPA. But you don't need to also embed all the FAQs and other crap into the SPA. You know what isn't an SPA? Hacker News. You know what else isn't? Google, GitHub, Amazon, and Stack Overflow. I've disabled the SPA version of Reddit. I've built SPAs and they are so much harder and take so much longer to develop and maintain than traditional web sites. I wish they'd just die. Sadly, everyone else at my work orgasms about SPAs, pushing every damn thing into it. We have stuff that works perfectly well and no one has ever complained about it? Screw it, let's spend $50k turning that feature into an SPA. I know many of you disagree with me and I'll get off my soap box now. </vent>